Toward a Bioregional State

Launched to provide an information service connected with _Toward a Bioregional State, the book; the blog is the commentary, your questions and my answers, and news from around the world related to the issues of sustainability and unsustainability in a running muse on various issues of concern or inspiration.

Wednesday, October 09, 2013

The Bioregional State as "Constitution, Version Two:" Arguments Why a Federated Bioregionalism is Better than Secession (4 of 4)

What would we want to rescue and resuscitate toward refederation? More civil rights protections? More environmental protections? More checks and balances to keep such an unrepresentative duopoly of party direction of the country from happening once more? More local financial security and local economies? The bioregional state has it all--the best of the past and the best of the future.

- emergencies (What happens in the event of natural or ecological disaster--or invasion? Do you have to go back to the Stone Age or under someone else's tyranny as the price of your secession? As other regions or the tyrannic federation you left opportunistically invades you whenever you have an internal difficulty? The Swiss seceded from the Holy Roman Empire, yet even they seldom felt that they could secede alone since their secession was dependent upon mutual military aid in the event of reconquest attempts. Their autonomy was dependent upon other regionally autonomous friends respecting it and helping them to maintain it--since other kinds of emergencies would develop sooner or later in any smaller more autonomous area. Autonomy requires co-autonomous friends instead of going it alone.

- redistribution (What happens to the base of wider taxation frameworks that people have? Smaller regions will be much smaller economies, and will likely find it hard to afford basic welfare state frameworks much less aid for second chances for the unlucky poor that require a second chance. The lack of such a mechanism of second chances for those down and out may contribute toward more permanent and greater inequalities of political and economic power after secession instead of removing such issues. For instance, only 39% of the US think the American Dream is possible for their children anymore. How much worse would even less redistribution capacities be? A second point about redistribution is more global: how will places that have been kept underdeveloped and under European tyrannies and ongoing intentional destabalizations to maintain such arrangements for centuries ever see mere secession as an ideal when that means autarkic poverty held a hand's length, instead of a re-federation for development with the people who control them from afar?

- conflict resolution (What happens when their are brotherly or sisterly disagreements between different seceeded areas over borders, assets, water flows, pollution from other areas? Is war to be the only way to solve multiple secession issues? Secession without federated secession encourages mere conflict resolution through reconquest. Moreover, avoid assuming that secession is always motivated by the same goals. For instance, if your neighbor just secedes to pollute more, if your neighbor poisons your water, if your neighbor steals your production or harms your regional citizens, well, what other solution are secessionists setting up for themselves except warfare or mutual raiding and retributive violence to solve it? And does that kind of internecine long term warfare actually lead to a more democratically representative, autonomous, or even sustainable material arrangement that most secessionists want? Hardly so, it leads to a small scale regional warlordism: a military domination internally and externally. It merely sets up more designs of reconquest to get one region's way over another as well. Furthermore, secession without allies is the kind of short-sighted secession that is exactly what a tyrannical elite wants to have further pretexts for an easy route to destroy regionalized opposition without friends. So secession by itself by its short term thinking really does play into further tyrannies that it wanted to avoid. The divide and conquer contexts of mere secession play into making it easy to conquer. If you really want to avoid a tyranny, then a re-federated agreement between bioreigons is better check and balances on tyranny from both the larger tyrants that still exist as well as any potential small scale internal tyrannnies from within the region itself that people romanticize 'won't happen here' after they secede.

- individual civil rights (What happens when regional levels create ethnic, religious or language hierarchies against internal minorities? Who will stand up for minorities, and what will be their support when the local secession is corruptly repressing them instead? Given the look on arch bioregional-secessionist Kirkpatrick Sale's face when asked how such a bioregionalist secession would protect individual civil rights from vicious repressive majorities, this is a point that the bioregional secessionists of the world like himself seems to have failed to consider: that humans are hardly always really nice to each other. This is another strong argument that a re-federated bioregionalism signing off to maintain a cross-bioregional, watershed-based judiciary that can enforce common universal principle of civil rights and ecological rights protections is important. As said in the book Toward a Bioregional State, keeping the civil rights centralized while keeping the material world decentralized seems to be the best of both worlds--if the bad choice of a complete civil and material decentralization has [1] mostly led to repressive ethnic and religious regimes that [2] by their repression on others resuscitate or protect such unrepresentative degradative relations in their region instead of move away from it. So on the other hand, in bioregional re-federation, such wider judicial universal civil rights protections for minorities--that would additionally be the conflict resolution solution mentioned in the previous point for assuring more cross-border ecological soundness as a conflict resolution against pollution flows--would be available. However, this is hardly a complete trust in such larger frameworks either: the point is for people living in particular bioregions to have political options of checks and balances on even their own bioregion. To the contrary, both conflict resolution over protecting individual and group civil rights (whether for cultural, sexual, language, or religious minorities or any inequalities on these themes) and protecting cross-border pollution flows from developing would be very weak under a model of pure secessional bioregionalism. Plus, instead of conceiving of these institutions larger than a singular bioregion as an attempt to make all regions culturally the same however, the bioregional re-federation would allow the movement of peoples to other places that do have their different subjective cultural qualities of life. Thus in a bioregional state a more polytopian view of plural subjective qualities of life can be maintained in different regions as long as they avoid common pollution flows upon each other. A polytopia is a group of real places as the model in the plural, contrasted to a singular utopia which is an unreal place or ideal that tends to become more dystopian the more that people attempt to force its singular standards of quality of life upon all--when quality of life is a subjective issue that should be decided upon by the individual that allows them to move around to find others of like minds. So instead of the larger judicial court arrangement being the only way to maintain desired civil rights, the wider plural bioregional areas would additionally be a means to allow internal migration more readily. People could assemble their own fluxing versions of subjective quality of life on more cultural issues while sharing the same base standards of objective quality of life concerns of sustainability and regional political representation, instead of using it to attempt to regulate any cultural uniformity into practice across all bioregions. And if the people culturally repressed in a region (typically a subaltern labor class) could easily leave or be assisted in leaving to formulate their own ideal polytopian bioregion elsewhere. If such a useful labor dries up in a more tyrannous bioregion, there would be large pressure to remove the elites or their strategies that encouraged such a repression, toward making policy more representative to that laboring class in the attempt to keep them there under a better deal. Historically for example, the evacuation of the city of Rome by the plebes many times in a mass strike was the only true and real threat they had. It could cause the patricians to rethink their previous strategy of an unrepresentative tyranny of jurisdiction over them on some point. Instead, under the real threat of leaving a bad situation, the patricians attempted more than not to woo them back with better treatment and more representative material and political settlements, widening Roman participation for all. Institutions like the CDI and CEI could develop into being the 'bioregional tribunes' of the people in this way, for example.

- infrastructural heritage (This of course may be the one issue that fails to apply. If secessionists wish to remove such things, this infrastructural heritage is what they wish to remove. However, if a bioregional re-federation is more ideal, then the question is what happens to major cities and emporia on the oceanic coasts? What happens to the freeways or public transportation networks between regions like trains or other means of travel? What happens to maintain securely the inherited dusty temples of all cold-shutdown nuclear plants, run and monitored by a honorable monastic engineering elite protecting your region that the radioactive nuclear equipment does indeed remain isolated, safe and quiet? In the event of secession or refederation, all of these issues are still there. Mere political institutional change is unable to wish it away so easily as if all of this will disappear automatically upon secession as if secession is some kind of reborn phoenix from the flame. Instead, secession has a lot of karmic history to work out still regarding what happened before secession or re-federation in the bioregion.

About Me

A very down to earth* kind of guy. I'm an environmental sociologist interested in establishing material and organizational sustainability worldwide. I'm always looking for interesting materials/technologies, inspiring ideas, or institutional examples of sustainability to inspire others to recognize their choices now. To be fatalistic about an unsustainable world is a sign of a captive mind, given all our options.
*(If "earth" is defined in a planetary sense, concerning comparative historical knowledge and interest in the past 10,000 years or so anywhere...) See both blogs.